China says Tibet torture video is 'a fake' as it blocks YouTube

China has closed the video-sharing website Youtube to internet users on the mainland in a move that may be linked to videos on the site allegedly showing police brutality in Tibet.

By Malcolm Moore in Shanghai

11:54AM GMT 25 Mar 2009

A video that appeared to show Chinese police beating handcuffed and prostrate Tibetan monks was posted twice on YouTube on March 20 and has been viewed over 3,500 times.

"We do not know the reason for the blockage," said Scott Rubin, a spokesman for Google, the owners of YouTube. He said the network in China began to slow on Monday and was eventually halted altogether on Tuesday.

In Beijing, the foreign ministry denied any knowledge of a YouTube ban, and said China was not afraid of the internet. "Many people have a false impression that the Chinese government fears the internet. In fact it is just the opposite," said a spokesman. "We encourage the active use of the internet but also manage it according to the law," he added.

But commentators suggested that censors had acted against YouTube because of sensitivity over Tibet.

The video showed Chinese police kicking and beating apparently defenceless Tibetan protesters, along with graphic images of a Tibetan identified as Tendar, who died from wounds allegedly inflicted by police during riots in Lhasa last March.

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The Dharamsala- based Tibetan government-in-exile, which released the rare video footage, said the treatment of the Tibetans violated international norms and amounted to torture.

But Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency, issued a rebuttal to the video, saying that the footage had been pieced together from different sources. The agency added that the person shown in the video was not in fact Tendar and that the wounds shown were fake.

An unnamed official said: "Tendar died from a disease at home awaiting court trial. The image of an injured person in the video is not that of Tendar and the wounds were fake."

China has accused Tibet of circulating the video in order to gain international sympathy. However, Beijing has also been courting public opinion. A study by David Bandurski, at the Hong Kong Media Project, showed that Chinese newspapers had published at least 3,087 articles praising China's rule in Tibet over March.

Security in China's Tibetan areas has been tightened in recent weeks because of sensitive anniversaries this month. March 14 marked the one-year anniversary of anti-government riots in Lhasa, Tibet's capital, while March 17 marked the 50th anniversary of the Dalai Lama's flight into exile after Chinese troops crushed a Tibetan uprising. Access to YouTube was patchy earlier this month, around the anniversary date itself.

China has a long history of internet censorship and is thought to have the most advanced internet surveillance systems in the world. A “Great Firewall” blocks content that is deemed unsuitable by censors while police scour the web to “harmonise” signs of dissent. Chinese web sites usually self-censor and sites including Google, Yahoo! Microsoft and Skype all block terms they believe the government would want them to censor.

In 2007, the city of Xiamen banned anonymous blog postings after text messages and blogs were used to coordinate protests against a planned chemical plant.

Last year, a report from the Pew Internet project in China showed that the majority of Chinese Internet users welcomed the idea of controls over content and believed it was natural that the government would censor the web.